The former law student, Mauricio Celis, claimed to have
practiced law in Mexico several years ago. He then founded a
Texas-based personal injury law firm. The State of Texas
found that he was practicing law without a license from Texas, or
even from Mexico, in 2009. The state convicted him and sentenced
him to ten years of probation. However, Celis maintained his
innocence throughout the Texas trial and has
ever since.

Case Runners

The Corpus Christi area of Texas where Celis “practiced law” was
unfortunately ripe for such manipulation. One area
lawyer, Carlos Cisneros, wrote a legal fiction thriller based on
his experiences in the region called The Case
Runner. In the book he dramatized the reputedly seedy
nature of the regional legal environment where “case runners” often
work with law firms to find promising cases in return for a portion
of the monetary winnings from the case. Some of the
runners are lawyers themselves who keep an eye out for potential
new clients and feed them to large litigation firms. Celis
acted as one of these “case runner” investigators and was very good
at it, bringing in great profits for himself. While he
started out holding himself out as just an investigator, he
eventually started saying that he held a law license, which most
everyone believed. Unfortunately for the attorneys who worked
with him, since he did not have a law license, not only
was Celis subject to discipline, but the lawyers who worked with
him were, as well.

Celis was such a good impostor that no one noticed for about
five years. Another lawyer in the area had grown suspicious
and looked into Celis’ background. It turns out that Celis
not only did not ever attend law school in the U.S. or Mexico, he
did not even finish college. Once that attorney brought this
information forward, the state bar and prosecutors got involved and
found that he had repeatedly violated state law. Prosecutors
were able to convict him on fourteen counts of falsely holding
himself out as a lawyer.

Northwestern Didn’t Ask About Felonies on its
Application

Celis applied, and was admitted to, Northwestern’s LLM program
for active lawyers from foreign countries in 2012. An LLM
program provides additional advanced education in a certain area of
law for those who already have a J.D. The application for the
LLM program did not ask if Celis had been convicted of a felony, so
he did not have to disclose that he was convicted for unauthorized
practice of law in Texas. Northwestern, and most other law
schools, ask that question for J.D. applicants, so Northwestern
likely omitted the question for the LLM program, assuming that an
LLM applicant would have to have a clean criminal record to obtain
a J.D.

After being expelled, Celis filed a suit against the university
claiming that he spent over $76,000 on his education there and that
he deserved to graduate since the school never directly asked about
any convictions. The case recently settled for undisclosed
terms.